Alessandro Marchetti

Alessandro Marchetti was an Italian mathematician, born in Pontormo near Empoli on 17 March 1633 and dying there on 6 September 1714. He studied law in Florence, then attended the mathematics lectures of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli at the University of Pisa, graduated in philosophy in 1659, lectured on natural philosophy from 1660 to 1677 and held the Chair of Mathematics at Pisa from 1677 until his death. An opponent of Aristotelianism who leaned toward the atomism of Democritus, he completed the first known Italian translation of Lucretius, Della natura delle cose, between 1664 and 1668. He was refused permission to publish it, and it circulated in manuscript before being printed in London in 1717. In 1669 he published Exercitationes mechanicae and De resistentia solidorum, regarded as his masterpiece, which tried to give the first coherent system for Galilean statics, and in 1674 he published Fundamenta universae scientiae de motu uniformiter accelerato. His Della natura delle comete of 1684 drew on observations of the comets of 1680 to 1682 and opposed both Ptolemaic astronomy and Cartesian vortex theory, and from 1710 to 1714 he was in dispute with Luigi Guido Grandi.